Newly Translated Note from Gautier to Boulanger

Here is a very fun & poetically playful little note from the Jeunes-Freance co-founder and poet Théophile Gautier to his fellow co-founder, the painter Louis Boulanger, written about 2-3 years (timelines are hazy) after the group stopped functioning as a defined unit – though as we see here the members remained dedicated to the networks of interdisciplinary collaboration that they had established through it and had already become a defining element of the avant-garde or otherstream community. I've tried to be as playful with my translation as Théo was in the original:

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14 Jan., 1836 

 

My dear Louis,

 

I’m exceedingly vexed at having made you wait like this; but here’s how it all went down; I was horribly stuffed up with a cold and forced to fold myself up in a domain of sweetsoftness, at the gushing fountain of herbal tea and marshmallow. The lovely child[1] has come twice to my place in Paris, I was in Passy,

 

With my disgruntled lungs in huge surges immersed

In those smooth creamy syrups Charlard thought up first.[2]

 

Upon returning I discover your letter, moreover an epistle of more of the unfortunate’s elegiacs,[3] which breaks my heart two times for the two of us missing one session here. I’ll sneak up on you from behind with the aforementioned beauty Friday or Saturday. We’ll get to work lighting the studio with our gaze if daylight doesn’t do it, and I think that the model’s eyes shall model passing well[4]. Incidentally should it have gone dark as in an oven,[5] your canvas is so dazzling and luminous that you’ll see everything else by it. 

 

I yearn for you to have cash, women, street cred (you’ve got that), fitness, inheritances out of the blue, all the wonders of the world, could you only take to heart each day twenty cartloads of enviers all frozen flat with rage.

 

Théophile Gautier.

 

 

NOTES

 

[1] A model who they seem to have been employing jointly, thus implying that Théo (trained as a painter but kicked out of art school for distributing Romanticist propaganda) was still painting a bit on the side, at least; or, if he was finding her for Boulanger alone, we are glimpsing another often-overlooked form of communal and interdisciplinary collaboration.

 

[2] The chemist and pharmacist Antione François Boutron Charlard, an early proponent of hydrotherapy. As far as I can tell this is an off-the-cuff improvisation by Théo.

 

[3] plus une épitre des plus élégiaques de l’infortunée

 

[4] sufficans, an archaic orthographical distortion used only in verse, resurrected by Gautier and other ultra-Romantics.

 

[5] The french for oven, four, may be an anglophone pun extending his french wordplay upon one (une) and two (deux) in this passage.

  

   

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from Aristide Marie, Le Peintre Poète: Louis Boulanger. 1925. La Vie et l’Art Romantiques, Floury, Éditeur: Paris. p. 63.